The director Elke Lehrenkrauss and the founder of the Berlin Pornfilmfestival, Jürgen Brüning, will dissect topics of autofiction and identity and body politics. Caroline Kirberg (pong Film) will discuss the ethics and aesthetics of care with two directors from our programme, Leonor Noivo and Brieuc Schieb. The musician and founder of the feminist horror film festival Final Girls, Sara Neidorf, will discuss cult and underground film with two of our directors and the cultural theorist Daniel Bird. Kristína Aschenbrennerova – the Rotterdam Film Festival (IFFR)’s specialist for Asian cinema – will scrutinize images of masculinity in pop culture together with film curator and critic Savina Petkova and performance artist Daniel Cremer. Heleen Gerritsen (goEast) and film critics Ela Bittencourt and Go Hirasawa will examine film and politics in the context of propaganda. On the final evening, directors Ulrike Ottinger and Rolf de Heer (The Survival of Kindness, Berlinale Competition) discuss surrealism, tenderness and visionary cinema with author Tom McCarthy.

TH 16 Feb
MISSING IN ACTION
The first film programme of this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week will bring four guests together for a debate. Valentin Merz, whose film De noche los gatos son pardos we will screen that evening, works specifically with the methods of autofiction. His new film has an ensemble of amateur actors meeting performers from feminist pornography. The essay filmmaker Yaela Gottlieb, whose film ¿Dónde está Marie Anne? we are also showing, deals with cultural and political spaces in addition to questions of nationality and identity. They will discuss popular images and genre cinema, fact and fiction, corporeality, and political cinema with director Elke Lehrenkrauss – whose film Lovemobil generated a controversy about ethics in documentary film and the role of film criticism in Germany last year – and with film producer and founder of the Berlin Pornfilmfestival Jürgen Brüning (The Misandrists, Too Much Pussy).
Moderation: Victor Guimarães

FR 17 FEB
AESTHETICS OF CARE
As a continuation of our opening conference Cinema of Care - Who looks after film culture?, on February 17, we present a film programme followed by a debate on the lines of connection between aesthetic practice and the ethics of care. The debate will feature three guests whose work regularly explores the intersections of documentary and fictional filmmaking. Leonor Noivo (Dawn) combines methods from film and theatre practice in her work, while also integrating elements of magical realism and experimental film. Brieuc Schieb cast his first feature film Koban Louzou with a group of amateurs and with French indie director Virgil Vernier. In his work, Schieb uses found footage to question notions about tradition and modernity. Film producer and director Caroline Kirberg worked together with Philip Scheffner and Merle Kröger at the Berlin production company pong Film on films that raise ethical questions through their form.
Moderation: Dennis Vetter

SA 18 FEB
MIDNIGHT METABOLISM
In our debate on February 18, we will be paying homage to midnight movies – a form of screening that established itself as a cult phenomenon in the USA in the 1970s, emphasizing aesthetically daring cinema, underground film, and subculture. At midnight on the festival Saturday, instead of starting with the film program, we will begin with a late-night debate over drinks in the cinema foyer. Together with our guests, we will be discussing how today’s festival cinema relates to the history of genre cinema. We also plan to ask the evening’s two directors whether their work has been influenced by cult films. Gathered around the cinema bar will be Amat Vallmajor del Pozo (Mission to Mars) and Syeyoung Park (The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra) along with Sara Neidorf – musician and founder of the feminist horror film festival Final Girls in Berlin – and finally the cultural theorist, author, restorer, and distributor Daniel Bird (Mondo Macabro).
Moderation: Inge Coolsaet

SO FEB 19
GENTLE GIANTS
Berlin Critics’ Week regularly invites film-loving guests from various art forms and disciplines to discuss cinema and art. Following our programme featuring the monster film Shin Ultraman by Shinji Higuchi and Marcelo Lin’s Serrão – the portrait of a rapper in Sao Paulo’s favelas – we will welcome the performance artist, writer and director Daniel Cremer, who has worked as a dramaturge for René Pollesch among others. Cremer employs elements of travesty in his solo performances and is intensely concerned with the transformation of language. Under the theme Gentle Giants we want to discuss pop culture and images of masculinity in art with Cremer alongside film critic and curator Savina Petkova and curator Kristina Aschenbrennerova. Currently Savina Petkova is working on the representation of animal bodies in film, while Kristina Aschenbrennerova is responsible for the research and selection of films from numerous Asian countries at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and has previously worked at such institutions as the Slovak Queer Film Festival.
Moderation: Nino Klingler

TU FEB 21
REACTION SHOT
On February 21 we will hold a debate on cinema that explicitly relates to contemporary history and political events, using three films as a starting point. We hope to understand what makes images political – and at what point agitation begins and propaganda ends. Joining the audience to debate will be filmmaker Vadim Kostrov, known for his impressionistic, melancholic portraits of Russian youth; Japanese film critic Go Hirasawa, who works closely with the controversial director and activist Masao Adachi; Heleen Gerritsen, who directs the goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European films; and film critic and curator Ela Bittencourt (Artforum, Film Comment).
Moderation: Dennis Vetter

WE FEB 22
CINECOLOGY
Are there spaces that exist only in films? What laws are obeyed by the spaces of art institutions? And what does it even mean to form a relationship with a place? We will debate political, poetic, philosophical, and ecological spatial thinking with two of the evening’s filmmakers – Dominique Loreau and Ariadine Zampaulo – as well as two other guests. Over the course of her career, Salomé Lamas has become a cartographer of wide-ranging cultural and experiential spaces, often ultimately linking her cinematic journeys and documentary footage to a decidedly artistic form of alienation. Senthuran Varatharajah is one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary literature and philosophy, particularly admired for his stylistic radicalism and for the way his work straddles prose and theory.
Moderation: Patrick Holzapfel

TH FEB 23
SOFTLY SURREAL
How can cinema – and art more broadly – incorporate both resistance and tenderness at the same time? What makes a film visionary, and what stylistic movements are able to capture the present? In a discussion about idiosyncratic and fantastic cinema, three guests will meet director and performance artist Lucía Seles, whose film Smog in Your Heart we will screen that evening. Cult director Rolf de Heer (Bad Boy Bubby) presents his new film The Survival of Kindness in competition at the Berlinale. Author Tom McCarthy (Remainder) continues to mine ideas from surrealism and futurism besides his writing work in the art group The International Necronautical Society. The avant-garde film and theater director, photographer, and performance artist Ulrike Ottinger (Freak Orlando, Chamissos Schatten) also looks back on a long career as a painter, which just makes us all the more eager to hear her views on the future of cinema. Finally, the evening’s film programme will open with the short film The Film to Come by Raúl Ruiz.
Moderation: Petra Palmer